Futuristic cop tale swims in paranoia
Jonathan Moore sets his new thriller in the near future, when San Francisco has become a hellhole of rampant street crime and consumerism run amok. For the populace, life is an endless round of compulsive and needless purchases; what’s all the rage this week will be passe next week, replaced by a frenzy for something equally gaudy.
Most every service has been privatized or commercialized. Among the few left untouched is the police force — or so it seems.
Walking these meanerthan-ever streets is Ross Carver, a veteran police inspector who is skillful and conscientious. One night, Carver answers a summons from his partner, Jenner, by reporting to a mansion; there, Carver is warned that he will find a dead man who “looks like he got cooked.”
Carver and Jenner are soon joined by FBI agents “dressed to weather a night on Venus.” The partners are ordered to undergo a cleansing in a truck parked
outside, which includes drinking a foul-tasting liquid and taking a hit from a medic with a “jet injector inoculation gun.”
Turn the page, and you find Carver lying in his bed, being read to by a vaguely familiar woman. This is Mia, his across-the-hall neighbor, who says she watched a uniformed crew carry him inside three days earlier. Carver remembers nothing.
The above is only the prelude to a grim and gripping tale of well-earned paranoia. One source of Carver’s burgeoning mistrust is Mia. She proves to be a big help as he tries to retrieve the missing hours of his life — and ■ he would love to trust her, if only she didn’t seem too good to be true.
Moore blends his story’s futuristic elements with more traditional tricks of the genre.
Carver knows how to pick an old-fashioned lock and seems to have studied Popeye Doyle’s moves in “The French Connection” — especially the last-second dash through the closing doors of a subway car.
And, for all its hightech poisons and gadgets, this is a novel with ample kneecapping.
Moore, a lawyer, uses his tight-lipped prose to fine effect: Carver sums up that knockout liquid he drank as “epilepsy in a cup” and notices “the riverine fissure marks” in a victim’s skull.
The author also takes advantage of San Francisco geography, putting to creepy use familiar landmarks such as Golden Gate Park, the Legion of Honor and the Fairmont Hotel.
The book’s tone is Chandleresque, the conspiracy worrying Carver and Jenner expands to Pynchonean proportions, and the physical ick they encounter might have oozed out of a Cronenberg movie.
On the whole, though, “The Night Market” and its predecessors — “The Poison Artist” and “The Dark Room” — are probably like nothing you’ve ever read.
In his acknowledgments, Moore sums up the novels as “a three-panel painting of San Francisco.” As done, he might have added, by Hieronymus Bosch.